Spike Lee's first- anniversary commemoration of the (as it turned out) optimistically labelled Million Man March. It tells of one motley group of fifteen or so who travel together to Washington, D.C., aboard a chartered bus from South Central L.A., and conduct a sort of mobile open forum of views and attitudes in the black community. (Open to all, anyway, except the apparent Muslim who mysteriously never speaks nor is spoken to over the distance of 3,000 miles.) No amount of fleeting roadside scenery, jiggly camerawork, coarse-grained film stock, random experimentation with artificial tints and altered speeds, etc., can disguise the staginess of the thing. And surely the concluding Prayer From Beyond The Grave would have been more effective had it not had to follow immediately upon someone else's Big Speech. And surely, too, the opening song by Michael (King of Pop) Jackson -- with a self-exculpatory lyric to the effect that if you don't like what you see in the mirror, you've got to make a change! -- starts us off on a bad foot. Still, in his assumed role as cultural emissary and educator (did you know that the black cowboy Bill Pickett invented steer wrestling? do you know to say "biracial" instead of "mulatto"?), this is Lee's most pressing and significant piece of work since Do the Right Thing: the imperative mood of the title should perhaps have tipped us off. It's in his primary role as a filmmaker that he continues to make little or no headway. If not even actual hindway. With Andre Braugher, Ossie Davis, Charles Dutton, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, DeAundre Bonds. (1996) — Duncan Shepherd